IRELAND
Daily Mail (United Kingdom)
Mark Dooley
With each passing day, the crisis in the Irish Catholic Church grows deeper. In a BBC This World documentary screened on BBC Northern Ireland last night, it was claimed that, in 1975, the Catholic Primate of Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, failed to inform parents that their children were being abused by the notorious paedophile priest, Brendan Smyth. Here is how one Irish newspaper reported the incident this morning:
‘In last night’s programme, Brendan Boland, who was abused by Smyth as a 12-year-old, claimed that information he gave to a Catholic Church inquiry team, which included Cardinal Brady, was not passed on to parents of the victims of the paedophile priest. Mr Boland from County Louth recounted how two of these victims, a boy from Belfast and a boy from Cavan, continued to be abused by the priest after the inquiry group, which comprised three priests, completed its work. The programme expands on information disclosed in 2010 about how the information compiled by the canonical inquiry in 1975, to which Mr Boland gave evidence, was not passed on to gardaí [police]. That disclosure led to calls for Cardinal Brady to resign’.
In response, a spokesman for the Cardinal said that ‘even according to today’s State and Church guidelines, Fr Brady [as he then was] would not be the person with responsibility for making a report to the civil authorities. That responsibility at the time rested with the only people who had the authority to stop Brendan Smyth, namely the Abbot of his Monastery’.
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